How to Include end-user browser information via Help Center

Often we get the request from our customers to integrate an easy to use way to send over important browser information when creating a ticket in the Help Center. The browser information is in a lot of cases very important to deliver proper support to your customers.

This trick will automatically grab all important information for your team and include it into a hidden textarea in your Help Center. I've used the source from Christian Ludwig which was for public use shared on Stack Overflow and made it ready to use for your Help Center.

Example in agent view

Instructions

Create a Custom Ticket Field and choose the Multi-line field. Make sure it's visible and editable for your end-user.

After creating the field grab the ID. You can easily find this ID by pressing Edit in the Ticket Field list The Field ID will be on the top of the page.

Copy the code below and paste it in your New Request template below all other HTML code. Change the browserfield_id in the top of the code to your Field ID. You could disable the Flash detection by deleting the first row.

50 Comments

Hi Dave, if you want to keep it hidden from the requestor it's no option to push it in the Ticket Comments. Later on the email reply the requester would notice this as it's been pasted under his or her message.

Another option would be to use the HTTP Targets to push an internal note to the ticket. This is quite easy if you follow these steps:

Go to your Settings in Zendesk Support

Scroll down and choose Extensions

Click add target and choose HTTP target

Fill in a Title for this action, for an example 'Push Browser Information To Ticket Stream'

At the URL enter the following (and replace {subdomain} with your Zendesk account: https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json

I'm following the steps and when I copy/paste the code below the last </div> tag I get a lot of white text and pink highlight.

I suspect that there may be some issue when I'm transferring a script to my Help Centre I was trying to use Google Chrome, IE, online HTML & JAVA editors and even the original version of this script: http://jsfiddle.net/ChristianL/AVyND/

To clarify since you mentioned mobile OSs -- are these requests that are via the mobile Help Center access through a browser, or are they requests from a Mobile SDK implementation? The two capture different sets of information.

If you go to the events view of a ticket submitter through a mobile browser, the initial comment will have a user agent string that looks something like this:

The top bullet point is called a user agent string and can be decoded using a site like http://www.useragentstring.com/ to see what browser they are using. Note that this string does not include the OS version nor the model/make; just the mobile browser info.

Meanwhile if you go to the events view of a ticket submitted via the SDK, you get something like this:

Zendesk-SDK/2.0.0 Android/23 Variant/Support

12.345.6.78

12, India

This includes the OS and SDK version, but not the make/model. However, if you hit the ticket audits API endpoint of the ticket, the SDK does capture that data in a "metadata" object. It looks like this:

The tickets created through the web widget automatically captures the browser and OS information of the requester. You can find these by clicking on the Conversations option at the upper left corner of the top of the ticket comment and change it to Events. If you scroll down to the bottom of the ticket, you will see a string of browser information there.

Let me know if you experience issues on your end as I'm happy to assist further.

Yes, I'm familiar with the conversations data point, however, in the above code it is writing to a field value as that gives us the ability to record that and also map that to a Jira field when we escalate to Jira. I would like the same ability that the mobile and laptop/desktop browser experience at the ticket creation level offers with the above code.

Any update on this? It would be great to have a fix if anyone knows how to get this working. Looks like Rudolf's question above was never really answered. And he was having the same problem as Chris in 2016. I'm having the same problem now. I followed the instructions exactly (plus tried removing the first line and the errant apostrophe another poster mentioned), and the end-user information simply isn't captured in my ticket. Thoughts?